Poll finds public turning to AI botsfor news updates

PARIS:

People are increasingly turning to generative artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT to follow day-to-day news, a respected media report published Tuesday found.

The yearly survey from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found “for the first time” that significant numbers of people were using chatbots to get headlines and updates, director Mitali Mukherjee wrote.

Attached to Britain’s Oxford University, the Reuters Institute annual report is seen as unmissable for people following the ways the media is changing.

Just seven percent of people report using AI to find news, according to the Institute’s poll of 97,000 people in 48 countries, carried out by YouGov.

But the proportion is higher among the young, at 12 percent of under-35s and 15 percent of under-25s.

The biggest-name chatbot — OpenAI’s ChatGPT —  is the most widely used, followed by Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama.

Respondents appreciated relevant, personalised news from chatbots.

Many more used AI to summarise (27 percent), translate (24 percent) or recommend (21 percent) articles, while almost one in five asked questions about current events.

Distrust remains, with those polled on balance saying AI risked making the news less transparent, less accurate and less trustworthy.

Rather than being programmed, today’s powerful AI “large language models” (LLMs) are “trained” on vast quantities of data from the web and other sources — including news media like text articles or video reports.

Once trained, they are able to generate text and images in response to users’ natural-language queries.